


The Monster in the Lake

by scioscribe



Category: Carrie - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Horror, Pre-Canon, Summer Camp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-07-14 12:42:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16040693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: It's a hot June morning at Christian Youth Camp, and the lake is as warm as blood.





	The Monster in the Lake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



On that hot June morning the lake was as warm as blood.  The good boys and girls of the Sunrise Brothers and Sisters Christian Youth Camp swam like fishes or else loafed on the docks or the loosely-tethered raft that bobbed drunkenly out by the buoy.  Calls went back and forth across the water, traveling as easily as birdsong.  _Belly flop, belly flop!_ and _Quit splashing me._

Two boys were diving for pennies.  Sue was watching them do it—the shining head-over-tails copper flip, the quick jackknife plunge and pursuit—and wishing she’d brought a little more sunscreen.  Her shoulders freckled easily in the summertime and after that they burned, pink and patchy.  She was usually careful, but the collective rush to take advantage of the heat wave had swept her along, disoriented.  Now it seemed more trouble than it was worth, sunburn or no sunburn, to go all the way back to the cabin.  She’d busted the rubber thong on one of her sandals.  So there she lay, watching.

“Come on, Sue,” one of the counselors said.  She was a cheerful, pigtailed girl named Maggie who believed in sing-alongs and clapping her hands to inspire people, who thought it was her personal mission from God to make sure all her campers Got Up and Joined an Activity.  “It isn’t good to just lie around.  Don’t you want to go have fun with your friends?”

Sue lowered her sunglasses.  The heat had made her stupid.  _Not really_ , she wanted to say, but Maggie was too nice to talk back to.  She nodded.  The water shone like a silver dollar.

“Duck her!” someone shouted the moment Sue slipped into the bathwater-warm lake.  For a second, shaking water from her ears, she thought they meant her, but no, she saw, it was Carrie White again.

Carrie came up sputtering.  Everybody came up sputtering, but Carrie always seemed to do it especially inelegantly, with a special kind of burble in her throat and her lips making a special kind of fishy gaping.  It was irresistible to poke at her.  Like making a big cube of Jell-O wobble with the tines of your fork.

She didn’t even have a swimsuit, just an old T-shirt that her dark nipples were showing through and a pair of faded madras shorts that had gotten awfully tight around her thighs and butt.  Some modesty, Sue thought, when you could see more of her that way than the other, when you were gun-to-your-head forced to think of Carrie White as a fleshy, sexual thing.

“Duck her again!”

Carrie’s laugh was hysterical, a peal of atonal bells.

Sue half-turned her head to look back at Maggie, but of course all Maggie saw was a bunch of kids having fun.  Maggie wouldn’t stop it.

“Duck her _again_ , duck her _again_.”

That time only Carrie’s lips, flexing like she was talking, like she was praying, broached the surface of the lake before she was pushed back down.

“Watch out,” one of the boys said, his hands thrust down below the surface.  “She kicks.”

“Aw, you shouldn’t kick, Carrie!  What would Jesus say?”

Carrie got her head above water again and screamed.  Down again she went—with less air this time, really, Sue thought clinically, even though she’d been up for longer, because she’d spent so much of it on that caterwauling yell.  She would have been better off to stick with the kicking.  Someone ought to do something.

Reluctantly, Sue swam over.  She was a good swimmer and she liked doing it; she liked how long and sleek and featureless her body felt underwater.  Maybe later she’d swim out to the buoy and back, work up a little hunger for the night’s dinner of meatloaf and canned peaches, yuck-city.

“Come on,” she said when she reached the little circle around Carrie.  “It was only funny the first time.”

“Sue, Sue, you shouldn’t lie at Christian Youth Camp.  It was funny the first _seven_ times and you know it,” and even as he was talking the boy dragged Carrie up by the neck of her shirt and then yanked her down again, like he was doing a bicep curl to impress her.  He had a good smile, with a slight chip on one front tooth.  Sue couldn’t remember his name.  Ted?  “But okay—ow, ow, fuck, what the hell was that?”

“Language!” Maggie shouted from the shore.

But the boy was panicking now, flailing wildly backwards, blood unspooling all around him.  “Something bit me!  Something bit me!”

Carrie surfaced.  There was something strange about how she looked, as if she had come too far up from the water—had they seen her collarbone when she was floating before?

The boy pointed at her.  “She bit me!  Carrie White bit me!”

“What a _freak_ ,” someone muttered.

Everyone was splashing away from the blood now, disgusted— _thanks for ruining the best day we’ve had so far, Carrie!_ —but then Ted slid under the water again.  When he came up once more, he was screaming so loudly Sue could see the cords in his neck standing out.  The water received another dark infusion of blood.

Carrie dog-paddled patiently in place, watching.

Sue, close to her, for some reason did the same.

“There’s a shark!” Ted screamed.  “There’s a shark or something, there’s something biting me—”

But now, despite the blood, people were starting to laugh at him a little, nervously but audibly.  A shark, really?  He’d probably just cut himself on some garbage someone had tossed in the lake.

But then other people started screaming too.

Carrie was floating higher and higher.  Her breasts showing now, half-revealed where the other kids had torn her shirt.  Now her stomach.  Now her legs.  Now even her feet, the pink and callused soles of her feet, because she was still going up.  Not a bit of her was in the water anymore.

She looked down at all that red and she smiled, but it was a horrible smile, a rictus like on a Halloween mask: she was frightened too, Sue thought.  She didn’t understand what was happening.

But Ted was sucked down into the water again all the same, this time with a speed like the lake itself had closed around him like a fist.  And this time with no blood.  Just the water filling his mouth and lungs as the minutes ticked on.  Sue counted the little kicks of her feet as she treaded water.  One-Mississippi.  Two-Mississippi.

Everyone else had run away.  She and Carrie were the only two left.

Carrie turned a white, slightly wall-eyed stare towards her.  For a second Sue felt a guppy-like nibble against her toes but then Carrie said, “I told them to stop,” and there was something broken in her voice, like whatever kept her afloat had come untethered or been wrenched to splinters.

Hope was a dim and brassy thing, half-buried in the lakebed.  Sue held her hand straight up in the air, like a drowning swimmer calling for help.  “I know you did, Carrie.  Come down.”

“I just wanted to swim with everybody else.”

“We can swim,” Sue said, though all the water around them was now dark with gore.  It was hard to keep herself upright with her arm up like this.  She waited to feel Carrie’s will push her down—but instead a ripple like a sudden wind swept across the lake, making gooseflesh prickle up on her arms.  All the blood was gone now, but where?  To the shore?  Somewhere else?  And where was the body?

The lake looked like a postcard.  Sunlight pooled on it, white and clean.

“There,” Carrie said.  Her eyelids looked heavy, like she’d been doped.  “I cleaned it up.  I got rid of it.”  She scraped one hand down her arm as if trying to scrub off some other stain.  A vein had burst in her cheek, bruise-dark and lighting-strike-shaped, like a crack in china.  “I just want a nice day.”

“We’ll swim,” Sue said again.  Her voice was shakier this time.

Gently, like a falling seedpod, Carrie drifted down to her.  To take root?

She was a bad swimmer, of course.  She couldn’t have gotten much practice.  But there was this heartbreaking, puppyish look in her eyes and this mulish set to her mouth that made Sue want to help her and told her that she had to.  She showed Carrie how to lie on her back and pinwheel her arms.  She would like that.  No water closing like a veil around her face, no shortage of air.  Just Carrie looking up at the sky.

Why had no one come?  Why were they all alone?  Where had everyone gone?  Just because no one ever stopped it, because no one ever came to help?  Or—

But now, distantly, she could hear helicopters.  The chop-chop-chop of the blades in the air.

“I’m tired,” Carrie said.  She didn’t turn her head to follow the noise.  “I want to lie down.”

“We’ll go back to camp,” Sue said.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”  Her tone was flat.  “No, I just want the raft.  They never let me on it.  I’m going to lie down on the raft.  You can do what you want.”  She did her wobbly breaststroke over to raft and pulled herself up on it, gasping as it teetered around.  But she made it on, Sue would give her that.  She made it there in the end, when people just left her alone.


End file.
